It's nice to see the addition of such things as stairs, airco units and free standing building accesories.A great improvement there would be the addition of shadows although I believe this may be extremely difficult as the direction and size of the shadow would ideally be movable and would also have to be transparent.

I'm excited about the new stuff coming down the pike. I was going to suggest a rotate option, but you're right on top of things. I appreciate the creativity and hard work going into making the software better.Thanks, Gazerm42

I am new to this program, only having it for a couple days now, but would like to make a couple suggestions. I realize this is primarily intended as an aid for those in the model railroad hobby, however I am approaching it more from the wargaming and military history side of the house.

When I am scouring the hobby shops and craft shops, it is pretty easy to find materials that cover the period of most railroad history, since about the Civil War. Whether it is signs, lettering fonts, color schemes, patterned boards and papers, building architecture plans or a wide variety of similar items, there is an abundance. What is difficult to find, outside of the rather narrow wargaming community, is all of those items covering the 300 years of American history before the railroads, say 1550-1840.

Earlier periods of American history involved building materials whose edges weren't normally so sharply and mechanically cut, often hand-hewed or roughly chopped and broken. Signs were mostly hand painting and covered a wide variety of items. Buildings often were just thrown up, not to a specific floor plan but raggedly configured. There were also buildings of excellent craftsmanship but they were built of rough materials, by our standards, or to a totally different type of construction.

Thus, I would like to see either as a part of the new version, or as add on packs some things like:

Rustic America Log Cabin textures, both horizontal and vertical Heavy hand-cut timbers, both horizontal and vertical Rough field stone patterns for both walls and floors Brushes, reeds and other organic materials for wall and roof coverings Signs and fencing

Colonial America Same as above but with slightly better quality, yet not machine produced. Cobblestone patterns for sidewalks and streets

Europe Same approach for pre-railroad Europe with the wide variety of materials and styles

Asia As the two above with things like bamboo walls and jungle environment materials

Middle East As for the others

Sorry to drag this out so much. I think you have done an excellent job with this program and it offers lots of possibilities in hobbies beyond railroads.

wow! Thanks very much for that list! There actually are a bunch of model railroaders who model Narrow Gauge who like the more rustic shacks and mining cabins, usually made out of hand cut wood. Much like you describe for early america. We have a survey running right now, (you can get to it at the top of the page) make sure you take the survey too. We are working starting some add-on packs so the more suggestions the better.

Regarding scale, you can input any number from 1:12 to 1:300 in the "other box" . Or try clicking on that Scale Guide button. We have a pretty good list of available scales. 1:144 is supported.

It would be nice to have a color palette to change the color of selected siding, bricks, etc. Also, siding and roofing with an overlap match line to permit cutting of strips for a more realistic finish

hi WJTThanks for contributing! I have moved your post to the existing wish list topic since we do not want to have 2 lists about the same topic running. You can read further up this post to see what others have suggested also.Again, welcome to the community we are happy to have you.

The ability to tile and resize your own imported textures will solve a lot of the needs list for custom structures.

The color palette option would work well for textures such as roofing and sidings. It would hold down program size as a neutral gray textured roof or siding could be easily made into most any color. I have used that trick in PSP on some models by altering existing photo textures using the Hue and Saturation features.

Weathering is something probably best done in PSP or Photoshop. That feature involves the use of various brushes and layer effects. This is where an export option other then printing as a PDF file would be useful.

Model Builder works best for its ability to quickly design structures to scale.

Currently, I am working on a series of carnival food booths based on a series of photos for HO modeling. Model Builder allowed me to quickly construct scale templates for the various sizes food trailers in use. Because every surface of the food trailer involves photographs, the final texturing is being done in PSP using its scaling feature.